Two weeks after being ousted from the government as part of the reshuffle, former Minister of National Education Pap Ndiaye spoke to Le Monde newspaper. He notes that his departure is a “trophy hunt” for the far right and the right.
While expressing his “sadness” and “disappointment”, he says he has no “bitterness”. He regrets, however, “not having been tactician enough” to keep his place, describing his successor Gabriel Attal as “pure politics”.
Pap Ndiaye spent a year and two months in his first political post, fourteen months which he considers to be among the “toughest” of his life. Accused of being a “wokist” or even an “indigenist”, he returns to the “heavy affront” of the criticisms made against him by the far right and the right.
“Barely named, he was the subject of incessant attacks”, testifies to World Jeanne Lazarus, wife of the former minister and director of research at the CNRS. The intellectual says he is aware that his profile is “unbearable for the far right”. “I am identified as a leftist, committed to issues of anti-racism, the fight against discrimination, everything that the far right abhors. And I’m a black man,” he explains.
At the beginning of July, he drew the wrath of the RN and LR when he described the CNews channel as a “very clearly far-right” media. The left supports him. For his part, Emmanuel Macron invokes the “freedom of expression” of the former director of the Palais de la Porte Dorée and the Museum of the History of Immigration.
Now an ambassador to the Council of Europe, he has admitted his need “to step back” from political public life. After this first experience within a ministry, the historian leaves with a question still unanswered: “To know if, in politics, one can also admit people who are not pure professionals. »
